Hitler’s devastating secret weapon: V2, by Robert Harris, reviewed

After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly and persuasively briefed him on the latest secret weapon, a powerful ballistic missile, with a film to demonstrate its capabilities. Hitler was enchanted. He said: ‘Gentlemen, I thank you. If we had had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war. No one would have dared oppose us.’ Hitler made the aristocratic von Braun an honorary professor — and ordered the manufacture of 10,000 of the new rockets.

The V2 was inaudible and invisible before its cataclysmic explosion, and after blast-off there was no defence

Germany had already been bombarding London with the V1, ‘Vengeance Weapon One’, the relatively slow-flying bomb that Londoners called the ‘doodlebug’, as if the nickname made it less fearsome, although, on a small scale, it was devastating. In contrast, the V2 flew at three times the speed of sound and reached an altitude of 58 miles before falling to earth with its one-ton warhead.